Rating Drivers

This post is primarily inspired after reading Clive's post on Fisico and Sutil. I started off commenting on that topic and realized it was getting way too long and that i might as well put it here! I sugest you read that post by Clive to get the background of this one.

Here is the gist of it. Clive (like me) thinks Sutil was overrated last season and with Fisico being a known commodity, we should know how good Sutil is by 2008. He also suggests that testing times so far has proved otherwise and somewhere in between comes in Clive's pet peeve about Scott Speed and Vettel! ;)

As long as racing has been alive, we have always had passionate discussions/arguments/counter arguments about who is/was good/bad/unlucky/lucky/overrated/underrated and it will continue.

The way i see it, racing fans are too impatient to pass on judgment on who is championship material and who is not. Until you have seen a driver win a championship, anyone's judgment is nothing more than a probability chance of flipping a coin. If you are lucky you tell everyone "I told you so". If you are not, you begin to look for excuses for your favorite driver.

Take the case of class of 2000, 01 and 02 rookies. Jenson Button, Juan Pablo Montoya, Kimi Raikonnen, Fernando Alonso, Felippe Massa, Mark Webber and Enrique Bernoldi. Except for Enrique, everyone else was tipped to be WDC material in the debut season. In case of Massa, even Peter Sauber talked him up by saying he was better than Kimi. That was before the season began of course! After 5 years, one is at NASCAR, one is still hoping to hold on to his Champ car/IRL drive depending on how it pans out, two are still hoping that their teams can can give them a car capable of winning races and only 2 have won drivers championship. I am yet to see evidence of Massa being better than Kimi. He MAY be a match to Kimi at best until proven otherwise. For the record, i rate Jenson Button very highly and hope to see him as a WDC some day but i am yet to see him even be a multiple grand prix winner. Same for Webber.

Lets look as the classes of 96,97,98 rookies. Same story. Fisico, Wurz, Ralf, JV etc. All were tipped as possible WDC's. We had only one from that lot. And however back you go, you will see the same pattern repeat. Why? because all of us make a judgment on a driver's ability far too soon. One or two inspired performances in a rookie season sways the fans easily towards a driver and then we are disappointed when the driver doesn't live up to our expectations.

To make a long story short, i will say that you can never pass a thorough judgment on a driver, until he has been in a car capable of winning races or on the very least, beaten comprehensively by all his teammates.

I will say the Jury is still out on all the rookie drivers of 05, 06 and o7. Liuzzi, Kubica, Rosberg, Heikki, Sutil, Kazuki and even Lewis Hamilton. And in this list, Sutil seems to be on the wrong side of the ranking list so far. Dont get your hopes high on any these drivers just yet and dont be disappointed later!

New kid on the block!!

Hello there,

After months and months of contemplation and outright laziness, finally i pull up myself to write a blog. As the name of the blog would suggest, this is going to be an out and out F1 blog where i will be posting my viewpoints and observations from time to time. I Do not expect myself to update this blog daily like some excellent blogs such as F1fanatic by Keith, F1insight by Clive, BlogF1 by ollie and like. Nevertheless, I ll chime in from time to time. With that said, lets get our first discussion started!! Welcome again.